Although a central construct for sociologists, the concept of institution continues to elude clear and full specification. One reason for this lack of clarity is that about 50 years ago empirical researchers in the field of sociology turned their gaze downward, away from macro-sociological constructs in order to focus their attention on middle-range empirical projects. It took almost 20 years for the concept of the institution to work its back onto the empirical research agenda of mainstream sociologists. The new institutional (...) project in organizational sociology led the way. Since then, scholars in this tradition have achieved a great deal but there is still much more to accomplish. Here, future directions for research are considered by reviewing how the concept of the institution has come to be treated by mainstream philosophers, sociologists of science and technology studies, and social network theorists. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur and the Lived Body’s explorations into the ethical, social, cultural, and affective dimensions of our corporeal existence draw on Paul Ricoeur’s reflection on the lived body. Starting with the fact that one’s own body is irreducible to an object, these essays critically contribute to discourses on the body.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Father’s Will: Christ’s Crucifixion and the Goodness of God by Nicholas E. Lombardo, O.P.Roger W. NuttThe Father’s Will: Christ’s Crucifixion and the Goodness of God. By Nicholas E. Lombardo, O.P. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 270. $99.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-19-968858-6.The centrality that Christ’s death by crucifixion has in Christian life, doctrine, and culture is scarcely in need of elaboration. Nevertheless, the relation between the (...) will of the Father and the violent and humiliating manner of Christ’s death raises substantive questions concerning the internal coherence of Christian claims about the love, goodness, and justice of God. In The Father’s Will: Christ’s Crucifixion and the Goodness of God, Nicholas E. Lombardo, O.P., confronts these questions, openly acknowledging their difficulty and seriousness, and provides a philosophically precise and theologically fresh response to the challenges they pose to the credibility of the Christian message.The ten chapters of The Father’s Will are divided into tripartite units that progress in logical sequence from “philosophical prolegomena” (part 1) to “New Testament evidence” (part 2), culminating with a “theological [End Page 317] evaluation” (part 3). The question at the heart of the book is how to reconcile the Christian doctrine that God and evil are incompatible with the theology of the Cross, which seems to require that God’s will is implicated in the evil actions that bring about Christ’s death.The first five chapters (part 1) provide a philosophical analysis of intention (chap. 1), value and obligation (chap. 2), double-effect reasoning (chap. 3), the ethical problems associated with self-sacrifice (chap. 4), and God’s will in relation to the crucifixion (chap. 5). Drawing on his analysis of intention and employing the principle of double effect, Lombardo establishes that it is not necessary to conclude that God wills the evils that are attendant on Christ’s death. “Actions performed by rational intentions,” Lombardo explains, “are not only intended; they are also willed. Rational intending implies rational choice, and rational choice is an act of the will” (32). This understanding of intention and willing, as distinguishable from intentional action, provides a foundation upon which the moral goodness of actions can be determined. “For an action to be good,” Lombardo argues, “it must do more than simply advance our natural inclinations: it must also avoid frustrating them. Only actions that both advance our natural inclinations and avoid frustrating them are morally good” (49). When moral actions have good effects and nonintended bad effects that do not outweigh the good effects—as in cases of self-defense or the use of medicine and medical procedures—these complex actions retain their moral goodness, notwithstanding the bad effects. The reason for this is that the bad effects are not included in the agent’s intention. Lombardo presents the crucifixion of Christ as one of these complex cases in which the bad effects can be separated from the agent’s intention. Chapter 3 explores the reasoning associated with the principle of double effect to clarify how actions implicated in bad or evil effects can be judged to be morally good. Lombardo is hesitant to identify double effect as an isolated principle that is applicable within unique circumstantial cases. Rather, he presents double effect as “merely an algorithm for applying basic concepts to morally ambiguous actions” (72). For example, in addition to affirming that the intended effects of the action are consistent with our natural inclinations, in cases of double-effect reasoning “the action’s positive, intended effects [must] outweigh the action’s negative, nonintended effects” (73). This material, in turn, connects logically with the conclusion of chapter 4 on the ethics of self-sacrifice: “double effect reasoning shows that it can be acceptable, and even heroic, to cause our own death non-intentionally for the sake of some greater good” (79). The last chapter in part 1 applies these distinctions to the problem of God’s will and the moral evil involved in Christ’s crucifixion. Here, the basic dilemma that the book addresses is succinctly restated: “Being all good, God never wants... (shrink)

Roger Penrose's original and provocative ideas about the large-scale physics of the Universe, the small-scale world of quantum physics and the physics of the mind have been the subject of controversy and discussion. These ideas were set forth in his best-selling books The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind. In this book, he summarises and brings up to date his current thinking in these complex areas. He presents a masterful summary of those areas of physics in which he (...) feels there are major unsolved problems. Through this, he introduces radically new concepts which he believes will be fruitful in understanding the workings of the brain and the nature of the human mind. These ideas are then challenged by three distinguished experts from different backgrounds - Abner Shimony and Nancy Cartwright as Philosophers of Science and Stephen Hawking as a Theoretical Physicist and Cosmologist. Finally, Roger Penrose responds to their thought-provoking criticisms. This volume provides an accessible, illuminating and stimulating introduction to Roger Penrose's vision of theoretical physics for the 21st Century. His enthusiasm, insight and good humour shine through this brilliant account of the problems of modern physics. (shrink)

Previous research conducted in 1999 highlighted ethical concerns behind challenge studies inducing psychosis with ketamine and made recommendations to enhance ethical standards. Recently, a plethora of clinical trials have evaluated the efficacy of ketamine to treat mood disorders, which lead to complex ethical issues. Pharmaceutical companies and researchers hope to profit by developing patentable variations on ketamine for treating depression. Media have labeled ketamine as a “miracle” antidepressant. Some clinics offer expensive off-label use of ketamine to treat mood disorders. This (...) article examines the ecological validity of ketamine trials, measures to protect patients, informed consent procedures, financial inducements to participants and conflict of interest of researchers, therapeutic misconception, concealment, and deception. Further recommendations are purposed to improve ethical standard of clinical research involving ketamine. (shrink)

Building on a long tradition of measuring cultural logics from a relational perspective, we analyze a recent survey of American university students to assess whether institutional logics operate in the lived experience of individuals. An institutional logic is an analytic troika of object, practice, and subject linked together through dually ordered systems of articulations. Using the formal method of correspondence analysis (MCA) we identify two latent dimensions that order physical, verbal, emotional, categorical, and moral practices of and investments in love. (...) We take these dimensions as evidence of an institutional logic. The dominant first dimension is organized through talk of love, non-genital physical intimacies, and affective investment. It has no sexual specificity. The subsidiary second dimension is organized through moral investment and it has a genital sexual specificity. There is little difference between women and men, either in the way these dimensions are organized or in the location of men and women within these dimensionalized spaces. We find that romantic love has a situated material effect in terms of increasing the probabilities of orgasm. (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE The spotlight that Martha Nussbaum turns on the plight of women in developing nations brings the disproportion between human capabilities and the opportunities to exercise them sharply into focus. Social prejudices, economic discrimination, and deep-seated traditions and attitudes all harbor the seeds of systemic injustices within governing policies and institutions. The refusal on the part of a dominant class to recognize the rights and claims (...) of subaltern individuals and groups has both symbolic and material consequences. The power that one group exercises over another brings the refusal to recognize the rights and claims of others to the fore. Thanks to the moral priority that Paul Ricoeur accords to the victim against such refusals, I tie the fragility of identity to the idea of justice’s federating force. This federating force, I therefore argue, accompanies the struggle for recognition among capable human beings. (shrink)

John Maynard Keynes was the most important economist of the twentieth century. He was also a philosopher who wrote on ethics and the theory of probability and was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists. In this volume contributors from a wide range of disciplines offer new interpretations of Keynes's thought, explain the links between Keynes's philosophy and his economics, and place his work and Keynesianism - the economic theory, the principles of economic policy, and the (...) political philosophy - in their historical context. Chapter topics include Keynes's philosophical engagement with G. E. Moore and Franz Brentano, his correspondence, the role of his General Theory in the creation of modern macroeconomics, and the many meanings of Keynesianism. New readers will find this the most convenient, accessible guide to Keynes currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Keynes. (shrink)

The notion that music’s expressive force is the spring of its affective power calls for a consideration of the language music speaks. Hermann Kretzschmar’s effort to set out a method for explicating music’s affects through discursive means falls short in this regard. Conversely, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reflections on the language of art opens the way to a hermeneutical consideration of music’s affective significance. Gadamer’s critique of Kant’s subjectivization of aesthetics disabuses us of the romantic conceit that music is a “language beyond (...) language.” Rather, music’s power to speak inheres in the communicability of the experiences occasioned by it. The hermeneutics of music I set out draws on Gadamer’s analysis of the phenomenon of play. Martin Heidegger’s reflections on the origin of the work of art complement Gadamer’s phenomenological account of the work of art’s mode of being. The truth expressed by a work, I accordingly argue, is one that it alone exemplifies. For a phenomenological hermeneutics of music, music’s communicability of feelings and moods to which it gives voice is consequently the spring of its worlding power. (shrink)

This chapter outlines the origins in ordinary language philosophy of a new skills-based approach to working with complex and conflicting values in medicine called values-based practice. Ordinary language philosophy focuses on our use of words as a useful first step in coming to a more complete understanding of their meanings. The theory of values-based practice was developed by applying ideas from ordinary language philosophy to the long-running debate about the "boundary problem" presented by the concept of mental disorder. Ordinary language (...) philosophy turns this debate topsy-turvy: it shows, that the concept of mental disorder instead of being the target problem is a resource for coming to a more complete understanding of the meanings of concepts of disorder as a whole including the concept of bodily disorder; and correspondingly, that the value-laden nature of mental disorder far from being part of the problem points to an evaluative element of meaning in concepts of disorder as a whole, again including concepts of bodily disorder. It is these topsy-turvy results that underpin the development of values-based practice. In a brief concluding section we indicate the potential for further development of values-based practice supported by ordinary language and other philosophies particularly through engagement with non-Western language groups representing diverse traditions of thought and practice in mental health. (shrink)

The multiplicity of demands and claims in ultra-pluralistic societies complicates the search for justice. Furthermore, the normative force of competing ideals gives rise to an aporia at the heart of the idea of justice’s federating force. In this article, I argue that exemplary moral and political acts evince these ideals by reason of their fittingness with respect to the demands of the situations to which they respond. As such, these acts lay claim to their normative value by exemplifying the “rule” (...) that each act summons. Drawing upon aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics, I show how imagination is operative in practical judgments. Accordingly, I relate the search for justice to an eschatology of non-violence, which for Paul Ricœur takes the place of the critique of ideology in its opposition to an ontology of lingual understanding. (shrink)

This book offers a unique account of the role imagination plays in advancing the course of freedom's actualization. It draws on Paul Ricoeur's philosophical anthropology of the capable human being as the staging ground for an extended inquiry into the challenges of making freedom a reality within the history of humankind. This book locates the abilities we exercise as capable human beings at the heart of a sustained analysis and reflection on the place of the idea of justice in a (...) hermeneutics for which every expectation regarding rights, liberties, and opportunities must be a hope for humanity as a whole. The vision of a reconciled humanity that for Ricoeur figures in a philosophy of the will provides an initial touchstone for a hermeneutics of liberation rooted in a philosophical anthropology for which the pathétique of human misery is its non- or pre-philosophical source. By setting the idea of the humanity in each of us against the backdrop of the necessity of preserving the tension between the space of our experiences and the horizons of our expectations, the book identifies the ethical and political dimensions of the idea of justice's federating force with the imperative of respect. Paul Ricoeur's Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in hermeneutics, phenomenology, ethics, political theory, and aesthetics. (shrink)

The exemplary value of individual moral and political acts provides a unique vantage point for inquiring into the role of the creative imagination in social life. Drawing on Kant’s concept of productive imagination, I argue that an act’s exemplification of a fitting response to a moral or political problem or crisis is comparable to the way that a work of art expresses the ‘thought’ or ‘idea’ to which it gives voice. The exercise of practical reason, or phronesis, is akin to (...) the way that a work augments the practical field of our experiences in this respect. For, like a work of art, the act produces the rule to be followed by means of the example that it sets. Accordingly, I explain how the injunction issuing from the act can be credited to the way that the singular case summons its rule. The singular character of the injunction issuing from the act thus brings to the fore the relation between reflective judgment and this injunction’s normative value. The conjunction of reason, action, and the creative power of imagination offers a critical point of access for interrogating the normative force of claims rooted in individual acts. By setting reason, action, and imagination in the same conceptual framework, I therefore highlight the creative imagination’s subversive role in countering hegemonic systems and habits of thought through promoting the causes of social and political struggles. (shrink)

Paul Ricœur’s recourse to the metahistorical categories, space of experience and horizon of expectation, invites an inquiry into geography’s role as the guarantor of history. The ontology of the flesh provides the first indication of how one’s body is implicated in the sense of one’s place in the world. In turn, narrative inscriptions of events on the landscape transform the physical topography of a place into an array of sites where memories of ancestral wisdom and historical traumas endure. By anchoring (...) historians’ representations of the past in the places and locales in which events took place, geography constructs a third space analogous to the third time of history. The aporias engendered by the phenomenology of time, however, have no equivalent in the phenomenology of space. The dissymmetry between the dialectic that informs the discourse of space and the one that informs the discourse of time thus keeps in place the reciprocal relation between geography and historiography. (shrink)

The aporias of time that Paul Ricœur identifies in the conclusion to his three-volume Time and Narrative offer a fecund starting-point from which to consider how the poetics of narrativity figures in a philosophy of the will. By setting the poetics of narrativity against the aporetics of temporality, Ricoeur highlights the narrative art’s operative power in drawing together incidents and events in answer to time’s dispersion across the present, the past, and the future. In turn, the confession of the limits (...) of narrative opens the way to a broader consideration of the idea of the unity of history in the absence of a meta-historical plot. This idea calls for a reflection on the ethical and political imperative of making freedom a reality for all. By taking the theory of freedom’s actualization as a touchstone, I argue that the vision of a reconciled humanity that for Ricœur is the intended object of the poetics of the will acquires the force of a directive idea. The capacity to refashion the real from within thus proves to be decisive for drawing out the connection between the aporetics of temporality, the poetics of narrativity, and Ricœur’s philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s claim that thinking is the last defense against the moral outrages of criminal political regimes sets the problematic of good and evil in relief. Human freedom, Paul Ricœur reminds us, is responsible for evil. The avowal of the evil of violence is thus the condition of our consciousness of the freedom to act anew. Aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics highlights our capacity to respond to exigencies in apposite ways. Exemplary representations of the (...) good, the right, and the justexpress a desire for being. Eros is accordingly the law of every work, word, deed, or act that answers to a difficulty, challenge, or crisis. Bound to living experiences, thought attains its true height through interrogating, demystifying, and vacating frozen norms, standards, and mores. Judgment actualizes thought’s liberating effects in answer to the demands of the situations in which we find ourselves. (shrink)

I dispute the claim that the disclosure of the life-world by phenomenology is an accomplishment of 'permanent' significance. By briefly reviewing the meaning of the "world" and "life-world" in the writings of Husserl, Gurwitsch, Schutz-Luckmann, Ortega, Heidegger, Jonas, Straus, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, I show that they all treat the world, or rather the affairs which comprise it, as passively present whether viewed as a mental acquisition or as the "Other." But the meaning of the world-as that wherein are met physical (...) demands upon us which must be satisfied if we are to continue living-cannot be considered either as a mental acquisition or as something that is "other" and over against us. A living being as living cannot fail to attend to the agency of the affairs of which the life-world consists, as well as one's own exploring and coping actions. If we are to really speak of life, then we must acknowledge the mutual and reciprocal activities of living beings and world. (shrink)

This paper sketches an account of public health ethics drawing upon established scholarship in feminist ethics. Health inequities are one of the central problems in public health ethics; a feminist approach leads us to examine not only the connections between gender, disadvantage, and health, but also the distribution of power in the processes of public health, from policy making through to programme delivery. The complexity of public health demands investigation using multiple perspectives and an attention to detail that is capable (...) of identifying the health issues that are important to women, and investigating ways to address these issues. Finally, a feminist account of public health ethics embraces rather than avoids the inescapable political dimensions of public health. (shrink)

This volume brings together eleven essays that address a range of issues extending from broader questions of social justice to the sexual intimacy that bears the mark of our fleshly existence. Collectively, these essays extend the reach of Paul Ricoeur’s early to late works by taking up some of the major social, political and religious challenges facing us in a postmodern, ultrapluralistic world.

In this paper I argue that it is morally important for doctors to trust patients. Doctors' trust of patients lays the foundation for medical relationships which support the exercise of patient autonomy, and which lead to an enriched understanding of patients' interests. Despite the moral and practical desirability of trust, distrust may occur for reasons relating to the nature of medicine, and the social and cultural context within which medical care is provided. Whilst it may not be possible to trust (...) at will, the conscious adoption of a trusting stance is both possible and warranted as the burdens of misplaced trust fall more heavily upon patients than doctors. (shrink)